Trepang2 is a fairly disjointed game, every time I’m delving into its original and action-packed gameplay systems, I’m having a ton of fun. When I’m playing through their short, but extremely boring and tedious segments of either: running away from monsters, or trying to battle a layered and superficial stealth system that doesn’t really work, I’m thinking about quitting it.
I guess youTrepang2 is a fairly disjointed game, every time I’m delving into its original and action-packed gameplay systems, I’m having a ton of fun. When I’m playing through their short, but extremely boring and tedious segments of either: running away from monsters, or trying to battle a layered and superficial stealth system that doesn’t really work, I’m thinking about quitting it.
I guess you could say that the game nails the action and combat, but fails miserably in its horror elements; the horror segments of this game are juvenile, shallow, boring, and cliché. There’s even a segment that relies on a popular meme for a locale for some reason.
Having said that, the missions in between, which for the most part are more action oriented and cheesy, are really, really good. This is mainly because the shooting and gameplay of Trepang2 is fantastic; you can juggle enemies in the air, activate slow motion, use invisibility for short windows of opportunity to try and reload your weapons, catch your breath, stuff like that.
It’s difficult to describe, but every element in the combat, mechanic wise and in presentation, works in a pristine way, the weapons are fun to use, although I do wish there had been more variety in which ones do you get and when; there’s this really cool nail gun akin to the F.E.A.R. one from Monolith (for obvious reasons, considering how much the game borrows from that title) but here it has a pretty cool gimmick, it makes it so the nails blow up after a getting stuck in the enemies…
There’s also the fact that you can customize your weapons, and later on into the game -about halfway through-, you’ll even get the ability to dual wield most of them; it’s pretty cool. The weapon parts that let you customize them are obtained by exploring the levels, they’re in these yellowish boxes you can find from time to time, they slightly alter some of the stats of your guns, but for the most part is just fun to get them in order to watch your weapon turn into a different one.
The big problem like I said, it’s the pacing, some might also bring up the length, but at four hours and 25 dollars, I’m not sure if this is a problem, the game is highly repayable considering you can keep all of your weapon parts and dual wielding abilities and replay through any mission you like; there are also cheat codes that alter the game in significant ways, but regrettably, most of these are locked behind completing missions on harder settings, some of the highest difficulty settings even warn you, “…Our publisher told us to remove this difficulty”. Maybe they should’ve listened, after a while it doesn’t become too fun to try and play such an action oriented and fast paced title at such a high difficulty setting, the game itself in the menu tells you “You’ll have to master every mechanic and cheese every encounter”; I’m paraphrasing, but I do remember the “cheese” part, mainly because of how strange it seemed to add a difficulty that even to the developers -implicitly-seemed unfair and unfun.
Overall, I was happy with my time with the game, I thought the story was good, although most of it is told through intel files that you gathered through the levels, some of these files are accompanied by images, some of which can be pretty gruesome, others intriguing. The issue here comes from the pacing and the sacrifice of personal ideas; everything that Trepang2 does well, is its own, the devs took inspiration from F.E.A.R. but build on top of the combat systems and gameplay elements from that game, this sadly didn’t extend to the horror elements however, the horror here seemed to rely in memes and cheap jump scares that don’t frighten as much as feel as pandering, every time I dealt with one of those sequences I wanted to go back to the awesome gunplay.
It's also a fairly confusing game story wise though, the story has some good elements but the conclusion doesn’t pay off and it frankly feels rushed and filled with loopholes, the type of thing that tried to string too many elements that didn’t really have any connection to one another, I enjoyed it, but I digress, it does have its issues and ends up feeling hollow in a lot of aspects.… Expand
Trepang2Your Score0 out of 10User Score
